President Obama has also announced recently his intent to nominate Daniel Benjamin, for Coordinator for Counterterrorism (S/CT), with the rank and status of Ambassador at Large.

Daniel Benjamin is director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. Prior to joining Brookings in 2006, he spent six years as a senior fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 1994 to1999, Benjamin served on the National Security Council staff: In 1998-1999, he was director for counterterrorism within the Directorate of Transnational Threats in 1998-1999; prior to that, he was a foreign policy speechwriter and special assistant to President Clinton.

Before entering the government, Benjamin was a foreign correspondent for TIME Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. Daniel Benjamin has co-written two books: The Age of Sacred Terror was published by Random House in 2002 and documents the rise of religiously motivated terrorism and American efforts to combat it. The book was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2002 and given the Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign Relations for the best book of the year on international affairs. The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right, was published by Holt/Times Books in 2005 and named a Washington Post “Best Book” of 2005. Mr. Benjamin has written numerous articles for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, TIME, the Los Angeles Times and other publications. He holds degrees from Harvard and Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

I think this is the second Marshall scholar we have in the current line-up.The other one is Kurt Campbell, nominee for the EAP Bureau.